I used the mini gun alot while leveling up, but at some point Blighted Rounds outperformed it and I made the switch. I was running two turrets and minigun for a long time.
In the endgame I’ve settled on a Tech Shaman build right now with Ice Turret, Cold Snap, and Blighted Rounds. I’ve not switched to the full on Pestilence build everyone seems to be running, but I really like having all the crowd control so I’ve full embraced the ice in my mods and playstyle.
Man, I tried this again yesterday, and the gunplay just feels awful.
For me, I’d describe it as inconsistent. The feel of, say, the assault rifle, is pretty solid, especially the variants with a lower ROF but higher damage. Feels pretty good and chunky. Shotguns vary, with the pump shotties being ok and the autoshotguns sort of meh–not enough difference between them and ARs. LMGs don’t have much of a presence, and marksman rifles are sort of just there.
I think where the game is particularly deficient though is in how it handles the impact of rounds on targets. You really don’t get much payoff there. Shooting a bunch of shotgun shells into a mob just sort of chips away at their health until they go poof. Not much else, maybe a little stagger.
The abilities though have pretty good feel and feedback.
I found the article above an interesting read. They’re a little more down on the game than I am personally, though I’m not really all that far into the game. I do get where they’re coming from with the world tier business, and I also feel like for the first time I get where @tomchick is coming from with the whole abdication of responsibility and tuning the difficulty level appropriately. It’s hard to tell sometimes when it’s the right move to adjust the world tier, are you banging your head against this particular enemy because it’s an intended roadblock for you, or are you just not at the appropriate tier for your character at that point? I don’t really like fiddling with the dial all that much and I’m not sure if I should just be sucking it up and letting it do its own thing or just constantly driving with my hand on the gearshift. It’s a weird game.
For me, it’s all a matter of how you’re setting the difficulty level. It’s basically up to you whether you want to play this as a game about managing hordes of bullet sponges or a game about dispatching swarms of hapless badguys with shotguns and superpowers.
In other words, if you don’t like the feel of the gunplay, turn down/up the world tier. Somewhere in there, you can find Painkiller or The Division or some point in between.
(Of course, this will effect the quality of the game as a loot chase, and I’m sure there’s a power curve when it comes to playing the endgame. But until then, seems you’re on your own to find the most satisfying gunplay.)
-Tom
I hope they add negative world tiers to this game, I’m really bad at it. I’m mostly kidding but there is sort of a sad feeling when I’m forced to drop the world tier down to 2 because I can’t survive 3.
Lots of info on what was causing the downtime, cross-play coming back, a balance update today, and some other things.
The Ammo skills getting nerfed I could see a mile away. Even post-nerf they’re likely still ridiculously better than anything else out there.
Something important I learned via the subreddit: your max health is determined by your average item level.
Let me bold that: Your max health is determined by your average item level. (screenshot not mine)
Don’t do what I did and neglect to replace your sidearm for 15 item levels because you never really used it. Oops. After playing about two hours last night and updating my gear to within a level or two of what I can wear, my max health went from 780hp to 2900hp, and I don’t have a single piece of armor granting max health. No wonder why I had been feeling incredibly squishy.
Also, re: Titanium: you can buy it from an NPC at about a 300:1 scrap/titanium ratio. Can’t recall when this NPC shows up, but she’s been tagging along for a bit.
It’s not a difficulty problem for me… It’s just that the act of aiming your gun feels loose and imprecise.
Wow, that’s uh, really important info right there. I assume it’s pointed out somewhere in the documentation but I don’t remember seeing it.
Probably, but as far as I can tell it’s buried in the gear score tooltip (don’t have access to the game right this minute). The in-game guide might mention it but I didn’t catch it when I looked through it the other day.
Hahahahahahaha
Their in-game guide (accessible via the main menu) actually is a lot better than most games these days. I was pleasantly surprised at how many mechanics it explains. For example, I thought for sure I was going to have to google to find out what “close range” vs “long range” meant in terms of skills/stats that affect those things but nope, it’s spelled right out in the in-game guide. So props to them for that. This item level => max HP thing might be in there somewhere. :)
I just had a minor “wow” moment. I finished up a chain of side quests (I think they are side quests) and the reward was like a cascade of legendaries. Like, ten of them. Woot. Some are even useful.
I really dislike that all these modifications to powers are based on the best players stats - some of us, who run around on world tier 5 and struggle, will really feel something like this.
the adjustments to the bullet abilities isnt based on the best players stats. It’s based on the fact that the ‘bang for your buck’ from those abilities is far more powerful and easier to obtain than any other ability in the game. Having said that I don’t think it’s cooldown is the problem. It’s probably more the fact you can get infinite uptime and have it never go on cooldown with the right abilities. Combined with the tremendous damage output it’s kinda nuts.
Also if anything feels bullet spongy at all, you are playing on too high of a difficulty. Don’t be afraid tp turn things down until you are optimized better.
I don’t think it’s based on the best player stats, they’re just the best abilities by far so the “best” (as in, highest level doing the hardest content) players use them exclusively. Even post-nerf, I ran an expedition and my Blighted Rounds accounted for 5 million damage. My blighted turret – which was deployed the entire fight and I’m specced/modded into it – clocked in at 112,000 damage. Toxin effects added up to another 200,000. The magic ammo abilities are still busted in how much better they are than anything else.
Put another way, a blighted round with my LMG hits from 3,000-5,000 damage and I have a 225 round magazine. If I use the Minigun skill, it hits for 900 damage BUT it gets mitigated by armor so it’s much lower than that, especially on Elites. It also has something like 120 bullets before it runs out (double that with the correct mod). However, I move slow, can’t dodge/use cover, etc. My blighted rounds also hit everyone in the area for 50% of the bullet damage and I go through an entire level without reloading my magazine so I never run out of blighted rounds. Meanwhile, minigun is on a 40s cooldown or so.
My original build was going Ordinance and relying on minigun, grenade, and the pain launcher but blighted rounds is without exaggeration 10x better at this point. I’m sure it’ll be addressed, but it’s a little unfortunate right now. I feel pigeonholed into it because Expeditions (stupidly) are timed trials, so if you’re not outputting max DPS at all times you’re crippling yourself.
I gave this game another shot, because why not, it’s free.
So, long range guns seem really awful. Like, every time I try to use a sniper rifle, it’s just an exercise in frustration.
However, abandoning that, I changed the way I played, and things were better.
One thing that is worth noting, is that use of skills seems way more crucial than a game like Destiny. They recharge fast, and are much more powerful.
I was playing my trickster, and I hadn’t previously noticed how fast the skills recharge. Specifically, the teleport skill. So last night, I started using that skill a LOT more.
This made things pretty cool and novel. If some dude is sniping at you from a roof? Screw trying to shoot back at him… just teleport up to him and blow him up with a shotgun at point blank range. This definitely changed the way the game was played.
I still don’t know whether I like this game or not… But I’ll keep trying it for a bit more.
Oh, I also found how to turn off the incredibad camera shake during cutscenes. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with that “feature”.
Definitely. It’s one of the things I like a lot better about it vs Destiny.
Ya, it’s just something you need to be prepared for, because Destiny plays like a shooter with some skills added… whereas Outriders doesn’t really play solidly as a shooter on its own.